Today In TV History: ‘Seinfeld’ Went Viral Before Viral Was A Thing With ‘The Boyfriend’

Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Seinfeld was such a famously slow burn for NBC that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it became A Thing. Ratings-wise, it wasn’t until the second half of season 4 that it started to get the kinds of viewership numbers we’d recognize as Seinfeldian. But all through the second and third seasons, the show was dropping the kind of easily-referenced observations that would come to characterize Seinfeld’s chief virtue: it was the king of the watercooler sitcoms. Just the list of episode titles from this era is enough to remind you of just how many Seinfeld plots became talking points: “The Pen,” “The Chinese Restaurant,” “The Parking Garage,” “The Pez Dispenser.” There hasn’t been a show before or since that has been better at generating word of mouth simply from its comedic concepts. If viral videos had been around in Seinfeld‘s day, that show would have been a dominant force.

Which brings us to “The Boyfriend,” Seinfeld‘s first hour-long episode, which features at least three moments that would have qualified for peak virality today. There’s the episode’s central concept, which sees Jerry so star-stuck at meeting baseball hero Keith Hernandez that he starts fretting over their budding friendship as if it were a romantic relationship. There’s a touch of retrograde gender-role stuff at play, but the show really sticks to the concept in a way that keeps delivering punchlines. Then there’s the scene where we hear Hernandez’s interior monologue while he’s on a date with Elaine, leading to the now-famous “I’m Keith Hernandez” line.

Improbably, as memorable as the Keith Hernandez stuff is, George’s subplot is perhaps even more memorable, as he invents a job opportunity at Vandelay Industries in order to placate the woman at the unemployment office. He’s a prospective salesman for their latex products. And it’s all going fine until Kramer answers Jerry’s phone.

But the biggest audience reaction in the episode comes when Jerry confronts Kramer and Newman about their antipathy towards Keith Hernandez. It all stemmed from an spitting incident at Shea Stadium five years prior. Only Jerry doesn’t buy it.

Once the audience realizes that Jerry is doing a JFK bit (the movie had only been released two months prior and was still in theaters), they go crazy, lapping up the pitch-perfect repetition of the “back and to the left” bit, among others. It’s this particular bit that I remember getting talked about immediately afterwards. A true collision of pop-culture obsessions, only America didn’t know that’s what Seinfeld was yet.